


The Art of Living (or How to Run through Empty Space without a Plan)

by Simply8Steps



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Death and Dying, Gen, Introspection, Thoughts on Life and Living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 08:56:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply8Steps/pseuds/Simply8Steps
Summary: Some differences are so small as to be invisible...





	The Art of Living (or How to Run through Empty Space without a Plan)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ on 08/18/2010. This is somewhat different, in terms of style, theme, and characters being dealt with, from what I've tried before. In many ways, it's sort of like an experiment. I'm actually not sure how to explain it, but I hope it's readable anyway.

I.  
  
It is slowly that she began to understand the slight distinction between dying and living. Live each day as if heading towards death or live every moment until the last. It is a thin line to walk on, and every person seems to tread the tightrope each day wandering from side to side.  
  
The apocalypse throws off the scale (a doctor’s words to a woman being no less apocalyptic), and people cry out in finding that routine now includes unexpected brushes with death without even the luxury of a rising and setting sun to mark the passage of time. It matters little in what form death chooses to come, only that they were a _dying_ race.  
  
Until the first child is born and the number goes up by one, and a President turns and laughs and cries.  
  
There is a chance at life.

  
  
II.  
  
Kara Thrace, or maybe it was only Starbuck, lived as she always had – always living and dying without a difference. It was her gift and her curse.  
  
She feels the rush of flying through fire the way she feels the rush of another person’s body.  
  
She lived bringing chaos and died in peace only to live again bringing chaos and confusion with her.  
  
She reaches peace again and disappears.  
  
Her lives and deaths are defined by contradictions.

  
  
III.  
  
William Adama regrets much in his life. He bears guilt like a harness – to toil wearing it until it wears down only to bind new blame on.  
  
It is one of the reasons why he has been so worn by life.  
  
But his heart grows with each day (an emotional medical condition – weakening walls and allowing him to bleed through and into skin and layers of metal) to envelope his vision whole.  
  
At the end of the worlds, he gains this second chance and stumbles blindly onward with his crew, his family, and humanity. His hands graze the small of her back and grasps the curves of her waist – feeling bones and death in his hands and realize that this feeling is his life in all its highs and lows.

  
  
IV.  
  
Pain was often the last sensation before death when one lives in a situation where pain medication is a rare and limited resource.  
  
The last of the medical staff realizes this and immediately meets to discuss priority and situational treatment.  
  
Cottle chain smokes throughout the entire meeting with a shaking hand as he tries to ignore the weight in his gut.  
  
Choices. When did medicine become all about choices? (All about empathy and sympathy and watching and not-able-to-do-anything?)  
  
He watches months later as a ‘young lady’ bears her pain like a mantle of holiness, watches her let it rush through her until her breaths come in gasps and sweat breaks out along her hairline.  
  
He watches as people die sweating and delusional.  
  
He watches them die screaming and drowning in their own blood.  
  
He watches years later as she walks down a red line, shaking like a newborn colt beginning its life. (The irony catches in his throat.)  
  
He remembers later, sitting among grass and enjoying the sun, arguing about saving medical supplies – he remembers a meeting years ago in a cold conference room when the worlds ended and life went on; discussions on pain thresholds and resilience. He remembers choices made and stories of black X’s.

  
  
V.  
  
The cylons live like a divine baker’s dozen. Life and death means nothing until they realize that they are not one and the same, just as living and dying are much more closer than their primary forms.  
  
“You drop an egg, you reach for another.” _This baker has already lost one of his dozen permanently._  
  
A Six breathes her last in a septic tank and later looks in her sister’s eyes to breathe her last for the last time – old memories clouding the new. Waiting to die, never to see the new. The same sister looks in the eyes of a sister but not of her kind. An eight, staring down the barrel of her gun and demanding, not asking for, her daughter. Two shots. Pain, and an old man with grief in his eyes outlined by sunlight and trees.  
  
Leoben, a metaphysical being lost in prophecies and the ramblings of a half-mad machine, lost on the planet Earth. Lost to see a live Kara Thrace find her own dead body and realize that he no longer knows the meaning of death. Because cylons no longer come back and a human apparently did.  
  
A Doral, seeking purpose but never having any, laughs in a corner of the landing bay of a basestar as he watches half of his kind depart to start a war. A war with no meaning if he doesn’t live or die. Just the boxing of an enemy to be awaited. The same Doral, two resurrections later, silently contemplates his end as the flash of a missile approaches. The hub is gone, and he has no belief to save him from the emptiness.  
  
The Eights cannot decide whether or not they are dying or living as a collective, but individually, they have split. It is the one blessing of theirs, as well as their greatest weakness at times, to desire to be human. They envy the others of their line their opportunities and experiences. Covet each other’s memories. Sharon Agathon in particular intrigues them. She is living, despite everything, for the love of her husband and daughter and _fleet_. They have learned however to avoid Boomer’s memory drive. Boomer is slowly dying, because of everything – for the love of Chief Tyrol and the Old Man and her comrades.  
  
Simon is curious. His brother has acted strangely ever since his return – he could of course access the mainframe of his model and steal memories, but theft is not part of his protocol. When he decides to ask, before this model is boxed by One, his brother answers: “I loved someone, brother. I had a family with the woman. I died for her.” Simon couldn’t help his response to this.  
  
“We do not die. It’s not in our physiology.”  
  
The smile he receives is pained. “Brother, you’re not even living.”  
  
Simon does not understand.  
  
The Cavils, the Ones, and they do not believe in different “names” (this thought is spat out as derisively as he considers his own naming – rather not have names at all), share the same thought about death as they did life. Whether living or dying, he just frankly didn’t care. His bitterness lashes at the shortsightedness of his own parents to place limits on him. He, who could have possibly tasted the universe, listened to atoms colliding… He could have seen the rainbow waves of radiation or touched black holes without such weakening human emotions as fear. (Instead, he asserts to himself: he doesn’t love, he isn’t jealous, he doesn’t care - Billions or one, humanity will die.)  
  
D’Anna and the other Threes die by living. They continually search for answers to the mysteries of their existence and find their answers moments before they are lost forever. Locked away in a box. Landed and stuck on a dead planet.  
  
The Final Five – human in every way except they are not human – lived the exact same quandaries as their fully awake cylon counterparts. After all, the line between human and cylon have been blurred for so long… only an awareness of mortality was lacking.

  
  
VI.  
  
On twelve planets, billions of people were living and dying.  
  
On a certain day, billions of people died in a moment – to that very last moment, some were living and some were dying.  
  
A woman stood on a cliff looking at the noon sun, skin gleaming with the sweat of her morning climb – she smiled even as the first nuclear warhead fell, suffocating instantly in the vacuum created by the impact.  
  
An elderly man tied to machines was waiting to die in one of Virgon’s best hospitals. His grandchild was skipping down the hall carrying a basket of fruit and a drawing pad to show-and-tell. When the flash of light passed across cataract-covered eyes – he was grateful to know that the child did not see his passage into Hades’ realm.  
  
A couple broke up that morning. Glasses were thrown, bags packed – a dark-eyed adolescent boy – handsome and grim, tattoos across his chest – opened a bottle of beer and sat on white sheets contemplating the new day and wondering if anything was to ever come of his life.  
  
On a certain day, a little more than fifty thousand people survived the bombing of their homes.  
  
A dying woman became President and began counting the living, a young boy learned that he loved a young girl, an old man became older, a sleeping cylon made love to an unknown cylon, a blond pilot gave a good fight, a young man still stuck in the uncertainties of boyhood began to learn the ways adulthood and responsibility can slap a person in the face, an atheistic priest began to plot, a scientist buried his guilt, a priestess wanted to die before she learned that she actually wanted to live, and a lawyer mourned, grasping a cat that he had never liked.  
  
_Oh Lords of Kobol… (May the One true God…) guide the living and the dead (guide our hand, so that we, your lambs, may not stray)… May peace find us (May we create the world as you have deemed it shall be)._  
  
May each moment be ours to hold in hand.  


 

Fine.  
  
"I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life." - the Judge, _The Grass Harp_ ; Truman Capote


End file.
